Someone has been mailing me recordings of myself…

Someone has been mailing me recordings of myself. First one was a couple weeks ago. It was just an unmarked DVD in a paper sleeve, addressed to me without a return. I figured it was some kind of spam mail and tossed it out. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

The second one was getting ready to romance the trash too, but it happened to arrive the day I bought a used XBOX. I wanted to test out the DVD player and didn’t have anything else handy, so I just popped it in and let it play.

The footage was a bit fuzzy and shaky like someone was walking while they recorded. It showed me entering my apartment building, following me until I got in the elevator. I even looked right at the camera for a second, but wracking my brain I couldn’t remember noticing anyone strange.

There was a voice-over too, but it was in German and I couldn’t make sense of it. I started it over and watched again. Only about 15 seconds − it wasn’t so much creepy as surreal. I was honestly more bothered by how terrible my posture looked than I was about someone recording me. Probably some kid showing off his new camera or something − the world is full of weirdos, right?

The third one rattled me though. The video showed me in the grocery store, wandering up and down the aisle looking for something. About ten seconds again – more German voice-over. This wasn’t someone innocently playing with their phone in the lobby anymore. I was being actively followed. I threw it away immediately, regretting it and digging it out of the trash a couple minutes later. I had to get this translated so I could figure out what the hell was going on.

The next day I shuffled through my mail like crazy looking for another DVD. Nothing came. Or the next day, or the one after that. Getting it translated fell further and further down my to-do list, until a week or so later I’d practically forgotten about it.

Until yesterday anyway, when another paper-sleeve slipped out from between some junk mail and landed on my floor. I rushed to play it, regretting it from the very first frame. The screen was panning around my room. My bedroom. It was dark, but everything had a green night-vision tint. The camera focused on the bed and started to approach. It took me a few seconds to recognize the lump in the dark. It was recording me while I slept.

A hand reached out from behind the camera – pale thin, hairless hand, with skin stretched too tight across the bones. And the digits were wrong: four to each finger, and double jointed, moving so fluidly they might as well have been tentacles. It rested a long finger on my forehead, trailing down my nose, over my lips, brushing so soft that I couldn’t tell whether it was touching at all. Something in German again – a sing-song voice barely above a whisper. It was longer this time, but I paused to keep going back until I could write down every word as close as I could hear it.

I watched the rest of the video before I translated anything. He stayed beside me for a long time, but I didn’t want to fast-forward because I was afraid of missing some crucial dialogue. I stared at it staring at me for almost an hour before I couldn’t take it anymore. The camera had been still for a long time, and I hadn’t heard or seen any other sign of the perpetrator. I decided even if something else did happen that night then I’d prefer not to know. I rummaged around until I found the elevator and the grocery store tapes too, writing down all the German from them to translate. After hacking my way through the spellings a few times, google translate gave me this:

Tape 1 – ??? (Don’t know, I threw it out before I knew what it was.)

Tape 2 – (Me in the elevator)
“Look at him go. I can’t believe he’s going back into the apartment after what we told him last time.”

Tape 3 – (Me at the grocery store)
“Found him again. Look how calm he is, just going about his life. Do you think he’s seen it yet?”

Tape 4 – (Whispered while I slept).
“Sleep, baby, sleep,
Thy father guards the sheep,
Thy mother shakes the little trees,
There falls down one little dream.

Sleep, baby, sleep!
Sleep, baby, sleep,
The sky draws the sheep,
The little stars are little lambs,
The moon, the little shepherd,

Sleep, baby, sleep!
Sleep, baby, sleep,
I shall bring your sheep
One with a golden bell,
That shall be thy journeyman,
to guide you safe to hell.”

That’s it. I don’t know whether this thing is trying to threaten me or protect me, or what it could be trying to protect me from. Either way, I don’t think I’m going to sleep tonight. I don’t know what I would do if I woke up and saw that thing watching me, recording me – even touching me with its long disjointed fingers. When the next DVD comes – if it comes…

Maybe one of you can watch it for me and tell me what happened? I don’t think I have the stomach to watch.